Jason Fletcher, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, La Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison will be giving the LCDS Seminar Tuesday May 27, 2:00 - 3:30pm, Butler Room, Nuffield College, University of Oxford. The talk is entitled: Moving Forward by Looking Back: New Evidence that Early Life Shapes our Lifespan.
The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease hypothesis proposes an important link between social/environmental conditions experienced early in life and old age health. Early conditions “program” our body’s response to challenges—famine conditions experienced in utero signal the developing organs and brain to store scarce energy; this programming leads to obesity and diabetes when the individual faces an environment with unlimited calories. However, discovering these important links with current data faces the challenge of needing data spanning ~80+ years to capture early life and old age; and we need ‘big data’ to find complex effects. We have no such data available. Our team makes use of newly released big data from the US Historical Census that captures early life linked to recent mortality records in order to overcome these challenges. Our results suggest widespread effects of early exposures on old age longevity—ranging from pesticide exposure to racial violence in the early 1900s linked with longevity through 2005. Further, our results suggest that these widespread, but individually modest-in-size, longevity effects require big data to be discovered—they would go undiscovered in available survey data on the health of older US adults because these survey data are too small.
Jason Fletcher is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Institute for the Study of Labor. He is an affiliate at UW of the Institute for Research on Poverty, Data Science Institute, and Holtz Center, among others. He received his PhD in Applied Economics from UW in 2006.
He studies the integration of genetics and social science and the early life conditions that shape older-age health, mortality, and cognition. His first book, with Dalton Conley, The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals about Ourselves, Our History, and the Future was published in 2017 by Princeton University Press. His work on US mortality is supported by the National Institute on Aging and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently summarizing these studies into a book.